Droid Harassment
by Stardustjinn
Summary: Obi-Wan was sure this was Anakin's fault. After all, who else would reprogram a bunch of mouse droids to follow him around the Temple all day? Oneshot. Humor.


**_[AN]_** ** _See if you can guess the culprit before the end._**

 ** _[EDIT] Thank you Pilot Girl for catching the typo! ...which was definitely a typo and not a misspelling. I just... forgot... 4 times. *facepalm*_**

 _You reap what you sow._

* * *

It had started out as a good day.

They were given a rare leave away from the front lines, and Mace had promised they would not be deployed for at least a week unless there was an emergency. Obi-Wan had taken a full night's rest, and had woken up feeling fresh for the first time in weeks. It was refreshing, being able to sleep without the continuous rumble of a starship's massive engines, or being woken up by blaster fires or some other disaster.

Falling back to the old Temple routine was also a relief, and he spent most of the morning meditating in the Room of Thousand Fountains. There were too many difficult problems to resolve and not enough time to think about them in the field. Then, after a quick lunch in the refectories and meeting a couple old friends, he headed towards the training rooms with the intention of running through some forms and perhaps spar with other Jedi.

When he reached the rooms, Obi-Wan noticed an MSE-6 droid on the marble floor. It was just sitting there, deceptively motionless save for a single blinking red light.

Obi-Wan stared at it, suddenly recalling the same type of droid with similar apparatus that had been lurking near the entrance of the refectory during lunches. These droids had no business in this part of the Temple building.

An irrational, almost horrifying suspicion formed in his mind. After making sure no one was around, Obi-Wan took a very cautious step backwards.

The droid remained in its spot.

He let out a deep breath. _You're losing it, Kenobi_ , he told himself. _It's the war. It's making you paranoid and see things._

Shaking his head, he quickly picked an empty dojo and went inside, unaware that that was just the beginning.

One had become two when Obi-Wan left the dojo, and then one shower later they had multiplied into four. By the time he set out on a prowl for a certain individual with affinity for droids, there was a full squad trailing behind him.

Said individual who, of course, was nowhere to be found.

Typical.

"Interesting company you keep, Master Kenobi."

Obi-Wan did _not_ nearly jump out of his skin, and instead bowed his head respectfully.

"Good afternoon, Master Yoda," he said. "Please excuse them. It is a temporary arrangement, I assure you. Say, have you seen Anakin?"

Yoda's ears twitched in what was probably a mix of amusement and sympathy. "Seen him today, I have not. But in the Temple he should be, hmm?"

"Yes, of course," Obi-Wan replied quickly. "He is around, it's just— he's not answering his comm," — _again_ — "and I couldn't find him in his room." _Or the hangar. Or the training grounds..._

"Hmm." Yoda's shrewd gaze bore into him. "Find him, I hope you do. As well as the solution, to your predicament."

Obi-Wan nodded once more and hastily went the opposite direction of where he could hear Quinlan Vos' boisterous laughter drawing close. _The things I do for you, Anakin,_ he grumbled to himself, before slipping into one of the lesser used corridors to encounter as few people as possible.

He felt a bump on his ankles and almost kicked the offender away in frustration.

 _Breathe,_ he reminded himself. _Serenity. There is no emotion, there is peace._

The gaggle of younglings coming from the other side gave extra motivation to keep his composure, as well as getting out of sight.

He passed the stairs and ducked into the closest storage room he could find, quickly shutting the door.

Inside the dark enclosed space, Obi-Wan sighed and looked down at his feet. Ten red lights blinked up back at him, as if awaiting for orders.

Ignoring, of course the only order Obi-Wan would give at this point.

He tapped his comm link, calling Anakin for the hundredth time, with same results. The comm on the other side was either out of battery or purposefully turned off. Knowing Anakin, it could be either.

 _Where are you?_

He pushed the thought through their bond, as deliberate and loud as possible.

Nothing. Obi-Wan didn't really expect there to be a response either. Their bond was stronger than most Master-Padawan pairs and it had remained solid even after Anakin's knighting. However, if one of them did not want to be found they would not be found, as Obi-Wan himself had demonstrated during the... during one of his recent solo missions. He did know that Anakin was nearby, at least. Somewhere around the Temple, so hopefully nowhere he _shouldn't_ be right now.

Hopefully.

Obi-Wan tried one more time, sinking into the Force and stretching out and...

There. Anakin's bright supernova of presence blinked in within the Temple. It felt as if he had just landed.

Opening his eyes, Obi-Wan left the storage room and headed to the hangar for the second time.

* * *

 _Great, what did I do this time?_ Anakin wondered as he saw his former master come his way from across the hangar with that purposeful stride and that oh-so-familiar _look_ on his face.

He made a quick mental recap of his day, and came up with nothing, which really didn't mean anything.

He braced himself for whatever grievances Obi-Wan was bringing him when he noticed—

"Hello, Anakin," Obi-Wan said in a pointed voice.

"Uh, hi," Anakin replied, distracted. He looked down again at the little droids that had clustered themselves around Obi-Wan's feet like baby birds following their mother, now that the Jedi Master had stopped moving. "I didn't know you adopted mouse droids."

"I _don't_."

And there was a _very_ awkward silence, even worse than the ones that tended to come after one of their nasty arguments.

"Well?" Obi-Wan prompted.

Anakin blinked. "...Well, what?"

The Jedi Master waved his hand at the droids. "You've had your laugh. So do send them back to their posts where they belong now, please."

 _...Oh._

He should be offended. He _would_ have been offended if, well, if it weren't for the little droids' presense. The implication that he still pulled that kind of childish tricks was irritating at best and insulting at worse, especially since he and Ahsoka no longer even played the droid kill count games. The prolonged war had sizzled out what little fun that might have been left in the pretend play.

On the other hand though, he _did_ have a reputation on that score, one that he regretted less than most. Even to this day there were droids wandering around somewhere in the Temple with mismatched parts all originating from different streets of Coruscant underground. And for all the Temple droids that came up to him with a broken photoreceptor, there were droids assigned to older Jedi Masters that seemed to have been given exclusive orders to run the opposite direction at the first sight of him.

So he settled on just raising an eyebrow. "I didn't do this." _For once._

"Really, now? And who else in the Temple would do something like this?" Obi-Wan asked.

"I don't know. How many mechanics have you offended lately?"

"I only know of one who is competent enough to pull this off."

"It really doesn't take much to reprogram mouse droids."

"But it does take some imagination."

Anakin rolled his eyes. What little patience he had was running fast. "Despite what the Council thinks, Master, I do have more important things to do other than reprogram a bunch of mouse droids."

It was the honest truth.

"Then where have you been all day?"

Anakin shrugged, not even bothering to hide his annoyance any more. "Added some modifications to the Twilight, took her for a spin. She hasn't flown in a while and the engines were getting rusty."

Which was true... technically speaking. The best thing about the hangar was that half of the personnel were droids while the other half were mechanics who didn't bother themselves with other people's business. They were busy enough with their own work to care much about who came and went at what time. As long as Anakin kept to himself, no one paid attention if he disappeared for a couple hours before showing up again.

It wasn't even that far off from the truth this time. Since Ahsoka had buggered off to play with her own friends, Anakin had jumped at the chance to head over to Republica 500. However, he had unfortunately only been able to catch Padme for a quick goodbye kiss before she left for some conference on Alderaan.

Obi-Wan was silent for a moment, before relenting. "Alright, fine. Would you take a look at what is wrong with these droids, please?"

Anakin shook his head, biting back a grin as he knelt down to pick up one of the droids. Obi-Wan always asked him for any problems he had with droids or other machinery, even though there were about a hundred other mechanics hired just for that purpose. It... well, it always felt good to feel useful from time to time.

"How long have they been doing this?" he asked, flipping open the droid's maintenance panel and linking it with his datapad to run diagnostics.

"Since noon."

"Have you tried deactivating them?"

"Yes, but every time I deactivate one, another would show up," Obi-Wan replied. "And I do not imagine the quartermaster would appreciate it if half of his mouse droids were left deactivated."

Anakin prodded on some of the wires, then checked the log readouts. "I don't see any obvious malfunction. It's not a hardware problem, at least."

He turned off its switch and, as Obi-Wan said, a new mouse droid that had just been milling around crawled up to them at once to fill up the missing space.

Obi-Wan crossed his arms. "Well done. Now you have boosted their ranks. Are you trying to build a droid army of your own now?"

Anakin pretended to think, mimicking Obi-Wan's habit of scratching his beard. "You know, that's not actually half a bad idea—"

"Only a full bad idea."

"Well, if it works—"

" _Anakin_."

"Come on, you never let me have fun!"

"And since when has that ever stopped you?"

He laughed. "Guess not," he said, switching the droid back on and letting it return to its brethren around Obi-Wan's heels. "Alright, alright, bad idea. I mean, who would even _think_ of using an army of droids?"

"Only someone who is half machine himself, of course."

"Well, I don't think they've been reprogrammed actually," Anakin said. "Somebody would have noticed if there was a mass reprogramming. Most likely they've just been given a system-wide directive disguised as a real order."

Seeing Obi-Wan's confusion, he quickly explained. "Mouse droids are usually required in groups, so it's easy to forward a request to all of them at once, so the available ones can move in position. It won't take much effort if whoever did this could bypass the firewalls from within the Temple."

Which meant it would be hellish trying to track down the directive in question among the thousands of other legitimate ones that flitted across the network every few seconds. Not to mention all the protocols they would have to go through before anyone could actually start digging in the sea of odd jobs assigned to hundreds of droids. Jedi Temple administration was no different from the others—getting any one of them to move was like wrangling a herd of sleepy shaaks.

Obi-Wan needed no further explanation, having wrestled with that particular behemoth more times than he cared to admit. "Wonderful."

"It could be on a timer," Anakin offered. "They usually reset after a time to protect against glitches."

"Those timers could last anywhere from a day to one whole week."

Anakin smirked. "Patience, Master. Remember?"

Obi-Wan's glare was incendiary. "Very funny, Anakin," he grumbled, before stalking off. The black squad immediately fell in line behind him, garnering attention from others.

Anakin watched until his former Master's back disappear from sight. Then he let his gaze fall sideways to a blue and white astromech droid that rolled up next to him, looking suspiciously innocent despite not having a face to look suspiciously innocent of.

He was not fooled. Folding his arms, he fixed the droid with a look that he had tried to pick up from Obi-Wan. It only worked with Ahsoka half the times, and it wasn't supposed to work on droids, and even if it did it certainly wouldn't work on _Artoo Deetoo_. He tried anyway.

"You have until midnight to redact that order and get those mouse droids back in line, okay?" he said in what he _hoped_ was a stern voice.

Artoo let out an inquiring sound, rolling back a little. If he had hands he would have been holding them up in fake innocence.

"Artoo..."

A disgruntled bleep this time, accompanied by a 90 degree sharp turn of his dome. There was no single word in basic to properly translate that, but the meaning was clear enough. Anakin sighed before crouching in front of his friend. This was all Obi-Wan's fault.

"Look, I know you don't appreciate his jokes. But you're not the one who's going to have to deal with him after this. He needs the rest."

Artoo asked a different question. Anakin gave it a thought before replying.

"Fine, tomorrow morning then. Just make sure they're gone when he wakes up."

The blasted droid _snickered_ before rolling away, leaving Anakin alone to wonder where he had gone so wrong with that astromech.


End file.
